Early Tremors of a Salon-Dominated Art System

Ultimately, the Académie royale only enjoyed a relatively brief twelve-year monopoly as gatekeeper to the status of artiste libre before it was called upon to submit proposals for Revolutionary restructuring.⁷ In proposing these reforms, the Académie royale’s membership erupted into years-long debates split across three distinct factions. A little-known engraver, Simon-Charles Miger, submitted a proposal in 1789 calling for moderate reform, such as better distribution of pensions and privileges among all ranks in the Académie and not just officiers. His proposal prompted the formation of a faction of radical dissenters that included Jacques-Louis David and Jean-Bernard Restout. This faction founded first the Société libre des beaux-arts (Free society for fine arts) in 1790, soon after renamed the Commune des Arts (Arts Commune), which sought to capsize the Académie’s elitist exclusiveness. They barred amateurs from joining but otherwise attracted over three-hundred Parisian artists, emphasizing practice and apprenticeship over instruction and formation—a deliberate rebuttal to the Académie royale’s ancien régime endeavors to enshrine itself as an institution of the liberal arts.⁸ The radical dissenters refused to participate in discussions to reform the Académie in 1790. Finally, the Académie’s officiers and its director, Joseph-Marie Vien, remained in a conservative faction that likewise ceased to participate in debate with the other factions and continued their sessions in the privacy of Vien’s home in 1790.⁹

Before returning to the outcome of these debates, we must first acknowledge that these shifts railroaded a recently changed system and interrupted plans to further consolidate that system. As we have established, from 1776 onward, the Académie royale secured a prime position as gatekeeper. It determined droit d’entrées (right of entry) for Parisian arts exhibitions and had jurisdiction to ratify whether an artist should be free from guild sanctions. D’Angivillier and the officiers of the Académie royale were firmly in charge of mounting and jurying the Salon exhibition, accepting membership to their corporation, and exempting artistes libres from the Corporation des maîtres peintres. D’Angivillier also had unrealized ambitions to create a museum for the display of Old Master painters in the Louvre Palace.¹⁰ If all had gone according to plan and the reign of Louis XVI had continued uninterrupted, d’Angivillier would also have been able to curate the criteria for formation and emulation via his selections for a museum of historical artworks. All of this was thrown into question in 1789, and only exacerbated in 1790–91 as the Académie royale’s membership fractured.

The Salon exhibitions continued, however, even as debates around the future of the Académie royale raged on. The same spirit of equality that briefly denied artists a distinct societal status also inspired opening admissions to the Salon exhibition in 1791. Accordingly, the Salon jury of Académie officiers was abolished, resulting in a spike in artists exhibiting and artworks on display. For the Salon of 1791, any artist could exhibit works—not just members of the Académie royale. While fifty-three painters and twenty-two sculptors exhibited artwork in 1789, in 1791, the number of painters on display more than tripled (172) and the number of sculptors more than doubled (53). The number of artworks on display experienced a similar jump: 220 paintings in 1789 to 615 in 1791; and 108 sculptures in 1789 to 129 in 1791.¹¹ Though the Académie royale was still in existence, its state of administrative turmoil during the 1790–91 debates about its future necessitated that both Salons be mounted by the State. Even the Salon’s livret was up for debate—the conservative faction of the Académie royale issued a livret that included only its membership, to which the Commune des Arts replied with their own livret listing artistes libres.¹²

Meanwhile, the review of each Académie royale faction’s proposal was delayed by the flight of Louis XVI and his family at the beginning of the Terror. In 1791 and 1792, as proposals languished in the National Assembly turned Convention, members of the conservative and moderate factions within the Académie began to attend sessions of the increasingly powerful Commune des Arts. These included Miger and Vien, both ostensibly leaders of their factions. Their hunches regarding a shift in power soon proved correct. In the summer of 1793, the last remnants of the privilege system were expunged and, on August 8, all Academies and guilds were shuttered. A month previously, the first decree granting artists intellectual copyright had been passed, giving them exclusive rights to sell and distribute their own artwork.¹³ This bait and switch officially made the practice of fine art individualistic in nature. Compounded by the 1791 institution of the licensing or patente system, both mechanical and liberal arts were liberalized and effectively prevented from gathering into powerful associations. All were required to obtain the rights to practice individually, whether via a license or intellectual copyright.

As any hope of restoring the Académie royale’s monopoly was extinguished, the Commune des Arts was assigned to mount and organize the Salon exhibition of 1793.¹⁴ The Salon of 1793 was again non-juried and nonexclusive, and continued the previous exhibition’s trend of bloating the number of artists and artworks on display. The number of painters increased by 50 per cent and the number of paintings by 11 percent. However, the Commune’s supremacy was extremely short-lived. Deemed to be far too similar to an academy, it was shut down that same year and replaced with Antoine Sergent-Merceau’s Société populaire et républicaine des arts (Popular and Republican Society for the Arts, SPRA), whose membership, since it did not discriminate against amateurs and included anyone claiming to practice the arts, reached six hundred.¹⁵ Membership was contingent upon adherence to Republican values rather than professional association. It did, however, uphold the dis tinction between the liberal and mechanical arts, and its abhorrence for decadence and luxe and tended to exclude the minor or decorative genres.¹⁶

The many organizations that cropped up to replace the Académie royale, in particular the SPRA, were partisans of the late ancien régime’s preference for history painting over other genres on the basis of its appeal to public and Republican, rather than private and bourgeois, values.¹⁷ However, the French Revolution had expunged the country of its wealthiest base of patronage and connoisseurship for this type of image: the monarchy, aristocracy, and the church. The State continued along a line similar to the ancien régime’s encouragements (encouragement or support) system, designed to buoy up the status of history painting and strengthen State patronage through competitions and beneficent commissions, but, during the Revolution, conducted so as to equalize and democratize access to patronage.

As such, during the Terror, the Committee for Public Safety ran concours (contests) where artists were invited to submit works to the Salon on a theme given by the State.¹⁸ However, to participate, artists invested material and labor costs in the concours in the hope of receiving a commission, which often never arrived given the increasingly desperate state of France’s finances during the Revolutionary Wars.¹⁹ Artists often complained that their talents were primarily being used to produce largely ephemeral painted and sculptural objects for the Revolution’s many parades and that this did not constitute a contribution to the stagnating progrès des arts.²⁰

It is significant to our account that the abolition of the privilege system between 1791 and 1793, and the subsequent closure of guilds and academies, paved the way for the proliferation of private theaters. Popular theater became an important site for the staging of art-world satire and the types, tropes, and narratives that intersected with satirical imagery and responded equally carefully to structural changes in the art world. The ten pieces of theater found for this period were all staged in private venues, with the Théâtre de Vaudeville, founded by Pierre-Yves Barré in 1792, leading the pack, and the Théâtre des Jeunes Artistes, which changed its name in 1794 from the Théâtre Français Comique et Lyrique, not far behind. The Théâtre de Mlle Montansier, which later became the Théâtre des Variétés, makes an appearance, as well as the Théâtre de Gaîté. Theater was under closer surveillance during the Revolution, and especially the Terror, than before. During the Terror, theaters were only permitted to play three times a week and were assigned Republican tragedies to play on key holidays. During the Directory and Consulate, this control relaxed but theaters were still censored since they were expected to participate in upholding morals and fostering Republican principals.²¹

These rapid sweeping structural and cultural changes served to justify and compound the by then already extant and increasingly prolific representation of the inglorious artist, which we will explore below. But they also complexified his representation. The debates around and eventual shuttering of the Académie royale destabilized any pretense that a corporate body was overseeing the quality of artworks being produced and the formation of national artists. This instability was only compounded by the throngs of painters able to exhibit at the free Salons of 1791 and 1793. It is here that the representation of the inglorious artist began to separate into branches and the trope of a charlatan painter began to emerge, testifying to art-world anxieties around safeguarding who could label themselves an artist. Similarly, as the Salon exhibition gradually became the only remaining pillar of a centuries-old and internationally revered art system, Salon admission increasingly became a dei ex machini in popular theater.

The Noble, Struggling Artist

A comedic version of the struggling artist that Louis-Sébastien Mercier earlier described in his article, “Greniers,” reappeared throughout turn-of-the-century popular theater and began to appear more regularly in satirical imagery. In theater, this artist is subject to an all-consuming creative absorption that prevents him from connecting emotionally to the turbulent scenes that unfurl before him, making him perplexingly unbothered by his own destitution. The absent-minded or overly absorbed artists’ families who suffer from the artist’s devotion to his profitless profession stand in for our more rational audience who presumably side with the family’s confusion regarding the artist’s disregard for his financial well-being and his dependents. In all of these cases, both the family and by association, the rational audience, excuse the artist for these failings: his destitution, as Mercier previously explained, is the direct result of his unwillingness to compromise or “prostitute” his art for financial gain, as expressed by a stubborn commitment to the higher genres—history painting, or, in our Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary theater and imagery, military painting. This struggling painter with noble convictions is not, however, always sympathetically depicted.

While the 1793 play Nicaise, Peintre (Nicaise, Painter) insinuates that Vermillion, the head of a small studio of two students, is a fairly unexceptional portrait painter, it is not until the 1799 Le Peintre dans son ménage (The painter in his household) that the poverty of the painter figures prominently in the play’s dialogue.²² The play’s protagonist is Aufinello, whose poverty and inability to pay rent plays a central role in the intrigue. His wife, Marie, gently reproaches him for ignoring their quotidian concerns and failing to ensure that the family has shelter and food. Aufinello, however, is committed to history painting and constantly silences his concerned wife, exclaiming “ma tête fermente, mon génie s’allume!” (my head ferments, my genius brightens!).²³

This representation of the tension between the painter’s elevated ambitions and his material circumstances echoes the ironic and satirical tone of representations like Étienne Jeaurat’s circa 1755 image of the evicted painter. But Le Peintre dans son ménage’s comedic and parodic portrayal of the delusional yet noble painter is better matched by contemporary images like Le Peintre de Portraits tourmenté par ses Créanciers (The Portrait Painter tormented by his Creditors, Figure 2.2), where a young and poor painter who wears his jacket without waistcoat, shirt, or cravat, smiles peacefully as he paints though he is assailed by the bread maker to whom he is indebted. A woman at the door yells at him likely demanding he pay his rent, and a calmer and finely dressed officer, who may be the painting’s patron, hovers over his shoulder.

This noble, struggling artist reappears in L’intrigue épistolaire (The epistolary intrigue, 1802), Le peintre français à Londres (The French painter in London, 1802), and Clémence et Waldémar of 1803.²⁴ In L’intrigue épistolaire, the artist is our haute comique (highly comical) character with whom the audience sympathizes the least but laughs at the most. The infamous Monsieur Fougère finds himself in a situation identical to Aufinello. The antagonist of this play, a prosecutor named Clénard, decides to collect on Monsieur Fougère’s debts by sending bailiffs to his single-room apartment to confiscate Fougère’s possessions. Fougère, again, is entirely unconcerned, and his wife begs him to produce artwork that would make him more money, recommending that he paint portraits of the bourgeoisie. Fougère responds: “Eh! Peins, peins nos bourgeois, et peins plutôt le diable, / Et gagne de l’argent”²⁵ (Ugh! Pains, pains our bourgeois, and paint indeed the devil, / And make money).

Monsieur Fougère became a celebrated comedic character, which earned him a place in Aaron Martinet’s endless series Petite Galerie Dramatique (Little Dramatic Gallery) in 1799 (Figure 2.3). Fougère dresses finely under his eccentric and brightly colored painter’s robe, working carefully on a large military painting, his facial features revealing his concentration and total absorption. Martinet’s caption for the image, as in all images in the Petite Galerie Dramatique, draws from the play itself. The verse captures Fougère scolding his wife for having distracted him from painting, though audiences of the image familiar with the play would know that Madame Fougère could only have been speaking to her husband of her concern over their eviction and seizure of goods. With this representation of the noble struggling artist reinforced in printed image and on stage, Mercier’s vision of the artist who refuses to prostitute his work is quickly overturned: he is depicted here instead as neglecting family duties in pursuit of glory and the progress of the arts, the latter of which necessarily contradicts pandering to a wealthy class of bourgeois patrons.

A contrasting, but equally popular representation of this same struggling, noble artist can be found in Clémence et Waldémar and Le peintre français à Londres. Waldémar, of Clémence et Waldémar, is a history painter and the clandestine lover-turned-husband of Clémence, who has run away from her father to marry him. Clémence’s father, Merfort, tracks Clémence down and plans to have his vengeance by challenging Waldémar to a duel. Waldémar eventually wins over her father via a portrait he has painted of Clémence and their son. In Le peintre français à Londres, a poor but talented painter named Maurice, originally from Paris but exiled in London, is approached by an esteemed British commander, Lord Solnen. Lord Solnen commissions a painting of the battle of Aboukir (properly, Abu Qir) from Maurice and is prepared to pay very handsomely for it. Maurice, struggling to repay debts owed to an art seller, refuses the commission since the subject matter would force him to commit an act of representational treason against the French.²⁶

In these plays, the painter is saved by his ability to paint, and his subject matter evidences his integrity or virtue. These sympathetic representations of the noble, struggling artist contrast with characters like Vermillion, Aufinello, Fougère, and the satire of the anonymous artist tormented by his creditors. Whereas Waldémar and Maurice are rewarded for their nobility, our playwrights have their more sympathetic characters chastise Vermillion, Aufinello, and Fougère for neglecting their duties to their family in favor of pursuing the nobility of painting. These characters are ridiculed for their inability to emotionally engage with anything outside of the realm of painting. The “type” that they manifest is a much more fleshed out and realized portrayal of that same artist in their attic studio that Mercier earlier described in glowing terms: absorbed entirely or almost entirely by their art, they remain committed to the progress of the arts as embodied by history painting, to the detriment of their material lives and families. We are told, or are left to assume, that these characters, though relatively unrecognized, are none theless talented.

Charlatan Painters: An Emerging Subtype

The virtuous but struggling painter, whether a protagonist rendered sympathetically or a comedic character who imparts levity to our comedies, is the most dominant representational mode for painter characters in Directory and Consulate art-world satire. An alternative character type, however, emerged at this time: the charlatan painter, with either no formal training or an inflated sense of their talent, or who employs deceptive tactics to enhance the quality of their paintings. We find this type in its infancy during the Revolution, Directory, and Consulate, when the ramifications of the artiste libre category, reified as we shall see in the patente laws, became a temporarily much more visible subject of concern during the free Salons of the Revolutionary period. The charlatan painter became a favored representational mode from the Empire onward and branched into a variety of subtypes, eventually giving birth to the eccentric bohemian of the July Monarchy.

The charlatan painter appeared in the 1798 Le déménagement du Sallon, ou le Portrait de Gilles (The moving of the Salon, or the Portrait of Gilles), the 1801 Les portaits au Salon (Portraits at the Salon), and again a year later in Croutinet, ou Le salon de Montargis (Croutinet, or The salon of Montargis).²⁷ The malicious and greedy art seller and incompetent but confident connoisseur finally found a parallel: the charlatan painter’s self-delusion is not apparent to the character, but clear to other characters in the play and certainly to audiences.

In Le déménagement du Sallon, the painter Arlequin and sculptor Gilles compete for the affection of Colombine, the daughter of Cassandre, a café owner and art amateur. Cassandre has decided that the Salon will be their battleground: the painting most celebrated by the public will dictate to whom Cassandre gives Colombine’s hand. Throughout the play, Arlequin hints that Gilles produces his portrait sculptures in illicit ways, casting molds of his own body and passing them off as portraits of others. In the dénouement of the play it is revealed that Gilles’s portrait sculpture of Cassandre looks conspicuously like a self-portrait.²⁸

In Les Portraits au Salon, the young lovers Pauline and Charles struggle to gain the approval of Pauline’s father Dumont, an older man and a painter who proudly declares at the beginning of the play that neither he nor his vain student Floricourt have bothered to learn to draw, finding instead that they were able to build their reputation both as painters and as learned men by avoiding any learning altogether:

Pauline.

Vous n’avez cependant jamais appris à dessiner.

Dumont.

Cela m’empêche-t-il de passer pour un bon peintre? ²⁹

[Pauline.

You have not however ever learned to draw.

Dumont.

Does that prevent me from passing for a good painter?]

Similarly, in Croutinet, the title character, protagonist, and aspiring painter is pitted against rival painters Micmac, Carmin, Bleuet, Dublanc, Lapalette, and Colorin in a provincial Salon organized by the connoisseur Dupinceau, who has dangled his daughter as the prize for the best painting presented at the Salon of Montargis. Dupinceau tells us that the young painters he has supported and tried to educate are interminably lazy, and he hopes that the prospect of his daughter Rose’s hand in marriage might motivate them to practice and improve their art. Dupinceau’s favorite, Micmac, returns from Paris with an affected accent and admits to having engaged in all sorts of licentious behavior—womanizing, dancing, gambling, theater, and so on—but never practiced his painting.³⁰ Croutinet uses this to his advantage in the dénouement of the play, humiliating Micmac and winning Rose’s hand in marriage.

The charlatan painters of theater never win the day. They are the easily vanquished competitors to our protagonists, the “real” artists, who expose charlatanry through their own competence and hard work. Nonetheless, the charlatan painter, absent from ancien régime theater and increasingly present thereafter, presents us with an entirely new character type as the representation of the artist stretches to accommodate an even more degrading version of itself. To the noble painter absorbed in their art to a fault we have seen added the noble, absent-minded painter who struggles financially, and finally, the visual artist who illicitly co-opts the title of painter or sculptor but is revealed as a charlatan with no talent at all. This development in the genealogy of the artist’s representation is explained by recent Revolutionary Salons, which exposed Parisian audiences to the full breadth of the artiste libre category, previously inadmissible in ancien régime Salons. We are presented with an art world descended into chaos. The artiste libre and the dissolution of France’s corporate structures initiated a free for all and the title of “painter” began to lose its meaning.

In satirical imagery, charlatan painters are depicted in a deeply unsympathetic way, rendering them with physiognomic indications of criminality, liminality, and malice that visually suggest to us that they do not deserve any of the socially elevated trappings of the professional and vocational title of artiste libre that they attribute to themselves. Le Citoyen Dupanceau is the most obvious example of this (Figure 2.4). This engraving shows a skinny, pointed artist with jutting jaw, protruding teeth, bulbous nose, and face so prune-like that it threatens to close over his eyes over which a Neanderthal-like brow looms. The artist’s ribs poke through his jacket, and his gangly limbs are overemphasized by the shortness of his sleeves and insufficiency of his culottes (short trousers). The artist is covered in contradictory Revolutionary emblems: he wears a tricorn hat, evocative of the ancien régime, instead of a Phrygian cap but it is adorned with a cockade and a set of brushes, and he wears a single sabot (clog).³¹ His malicious face has punctured his own easel painting, which he carries around with him while he drags a reluctant harpy—a mythological monster frequently employed to caricature ancien régime nobility and Marie Antoinette in particular—signaling the artist’s reluctance to abandon what is here being characterized as a conservative ancien régime loyalty to corporatism and patronage.³²

Le Citoyen Dupanceau employs contrasting visual signs to suggest that these artists straddle contradictory allegiances to Republican values and the declining nobility. Given the debates we have discussed in which, circa 1791–93, a variety of conflicting associations with artists developed, this image visualizes that conflict in the stature and dress of the artist: the SPRA’s values of Republican citizenship are embodied in the insignia of Revolution whereas the Commune des Arts’ and patente laws’ privileging of art’s artisanal and laboring characteristics manifest in the ugliness of the artist, which, recalling the visualizations of ancien régime gagne-deniers, stand as a visual and Lavater-informed physiognomic shorthand for the juridical ramifications of being dispossessed of corporate rights. Meanwhile, the dragging harpy, the artist’s habit, and his tricorn hat recall ancien régime and noble modes of dress reminiscent of the conservative factions of the Académie royale.

These themes are revisited in other Revolutionary imagery, most notably the popular theme of the diable d’argent (Figure 2.5). In Le Grand Diable Mammon d’Argent: Patron de la Finance (The Great Money Devil Mammon: Head of Finance), social types rally around the devil to desperately collect the coins that pour from its bourses (purse), mouth, and tail. Favorite stock artisanal merchants—the wine merchant and bread maker—attempt both to reel in and domesticate the money devil and collect money. Meanwhile, a painter to the far left, laden with remarkably overdetermined iconography of delusion and derangement has instead tried to wound the money devil with his musket. His palette and brushes are perched precariously on his head and butterflies and mice sprout from this strange arrangement, indicating poverty and foolishness. The text bubble next to him suggests his motivations: “Je tire de fort près et ne puis rien avoir. Le maudit Procureur aura tout” (I fire from very close and can get nothing. The damned Prosecutor will get everything). The prosecutor next to the painter is positioned as his natural enemy, recalling imagery and theater that depict the indebted artist subject to seizures and eviction.

In satirical imagery, the charlatan painter is depicted as having prostituted his art, delusional and blissfully unaware of even having done so. For instance, the 1789 Je suis comme le Tems au Gagne Petit (I am like Time to the Knife Grinder/Earns Little) shows us an extremely poor and disheveled artist, again depicted with malicious features (Figure 2.6). His jaw is over extended, his lips widened, and his brow unnecessarily furrowed. His fine ancien régime dress has frayed, and his ennobling sword, now obsolete, dangles off the back of his broken chair. Nonetheless, he emulates the genteel and professional poses of Académie royale portraits: his legs are delicately crossed and he peers coyly back over his shoulder as his brush hovers over an easel painting of a knife-grinder, otherwise known as a gagne-petit. This painter, whose decaying dress indicates to us former prestige and a professional affiliation long expired, is painting a version of David Teniers the Younger’s circa 1640 image, then in the Louvre collection, though the knife-grinder as gagne-petit appeared frequently in French graphic satire. Teniers’s painting later became the model for a well-known bas-relief marble shop sign still visible on the avenue de l’Opéra at Au Gagne Petit. This satirical image’s caption and painting participate in a network of verbal-visual puns. The painter’s status can now be put in conversation with the free but poor and nomadic trades, such as knife-grinding, as the painter now suffers the monotony of his work in the same way as the grinder who endlessly watches his grinding stone spin. And the painter has now been reduced to producing shop signs, which also debases his liberal art to the status of a mechanical art.

Finally, the charlatan painter as manifested in satirical imagery is not only celebrated for his poverty and derided for his questionable allegiances, but is also accused of prostituting his art. For instance, in the humorous com posite images Paris tel quil [sic] est (Paris as it is, Figure 2.7), a young well-dressed painter named Crouton whose clothing shows visible signs of decay appears in the lower right-hand corner. Crouton is off to visit a “maison de prêt” (pawnshop) hoping to exchange his artwork for some money to live on. A similar joke about the lengths to which artists might go to profit from their trade, Martinet published an image entitled L’Artiste dans son coup de feu (The Artist at his busiest) in the series Encore Une, Encore Une (Another, Another, Figure 2.8).³³ Dressed in the English riding fashion popular in the Revolutionary period and with a cockade proudly pinned to his top hat, our first prosperous artist is not a painter, but an illustrator avant la lettre.³⁴ He rushes with a folio of caricatures he has drawn, the top right of which is this very same caricature of himself rushing with his portfolio. The expression of “coup de feu” in relation to the artist indicates an impassioned and urgent series of brush marks, often celebrated as the expression of genius, and sometimes discouraged as likely to destroy a painting.³⁵ Here, Martinet’s illustrator distorts the feverish gestures of genius; instead, they become the feverish hustling of the artist peddling his satirical drawings.

These early manifestations of what would become a much more elaborate and discernable network of charlatan types is an important indicator of the instability of the category of the artist, at least as it was perceived by artists themselves. A line was delicately drawn between those noble starving artists who aspire to contribute to the progrès des arts, and a separate category of false artists only worthy of suspicion and derided for their failures. Accordingly, in the absence of corporate bodies that might adjudicate the position-taking of real versus pretender artists, popular theater in particular gravitated to new dei ex machini that might lift the artist out of their poverty or their obscurity, doling out the just desserts of an economy of symbolic goods.

Deus ex Machina: Connoisseurs, Salon Admission, and Portraiture

At the climax of almost every play from this period, an unlikely event for which the audience is just barely prepared reverses a previously impossible situation. This deus ex machina tends to come in the form of either the reverence of an esteemed connoisseur or admission to the Salon. These career-based dei ex machina persist after the Consulate through the July Monarchy. They also coincide with the power of portraiture within these stories: in these heavily character-driven plays, a portrait, usually of another key character, is either exhibited in the Salon or acquired by a connoisseur, thus helping to overcome any obstacles to the union of the play’s two young lovers.³⁶

It is primarily the noble, struggling artist type who benefits from the intercession of a benevolent connoisseur as deus. The connoisseur thus provides the hitherto-unrecognized genius’s first instance of recognition, and through his recognition, any obstacles to our hero and heroine’s union are overcome. In Le Peintre dans son ménage, Le Peintre Français à Londres, and Clémence et Waldémar, the connoisseur’s intercession comes in the form of the purchase of a painting, and it is that purchase that permits the previously struggling artist to overcome any remaining obstacles to their romantic happiness. For instance, in Le Peintre dans son ménage, the root cause of Aufinello’s problems is his nobility and thus unwillingness to produce more profitable paintings. He is nonetheless rewarded for his obstinacy and patience. The rich, bourgeois connoisseur Dolban saves Aufinello and his family from eviction and seizure. Thanks to their landlady’s schemes, Dolban discovers the genius of Aufinello’s artwork and advances him a generous sum for a future painting, simultaneously blessing his nephew Florval’s union with Agathe. In Le peintre français à Londres, something similar occurs: Lord Solnen’s awe at Maurice’s skill and his respect for his patriotism lead Solnen to commission a painting and advance a sum to Maurice that the latter can use to pay his debts, avoid being imprisoned, and thus render himself worthy of Mme St. Clair’s affection.

In the space of only a few lines, the connoisseur recognizes the previously unacknowledged genius, saves the struggling artist from succumbing to debt and debtor’s prison, and forecasts his future success. The connoisseur’s patronage and recognition become not only the key to the artist’s success and posterity, but the solution to his impoverished material conditions. This particular form of deus ex machina justifies the nobility of the poor, starving artist by suggesting that the truly honorable artists will eventually be recognized and saved, so long as they do not succumb to avarice. In contrast, the connoisseur, who figures only rarely in satirical imagery from 1789 to 1803, is presented first and foremost in that imagery as a nuisance—a strange vestigial limb that only encumbers the artist (Table 2.3). As we can see, the number of connoisseurs (and art critics) in art-world graphic satire declined precipitously from the Revolution through the Empire. They never returned to the proportional representation they enjoyed in the ancien régime.

In the 1795 Le professeur de Dessin (The Drawing Professor), a connoisseur peers over the shoulder of an art instructor counseling a student who seems to be measuring the Apollo Belvedere’s genitalia (Figure 2.9).³⁷ The Apollo Belvedere had only very recently been removed from Italy and placed in the recently opened Louvre Museum, where it immediately served the function that its spoliation and the museum’s commission envisioned: it acted as a focal point for formation, emulation, and art appreciation. In Le professeur de Dessin, however, there are lascivious and homoerotic overtones to that emulation and appreciation. The anachronistically bewigged connoisseur, hovering at the edge of a student-teacher encounter, has his umbrella conspicuously positioned between his legs. Pulling out his loupe, he exclaims “Quel beau morceau!!!” (What a good piece!!!) The connoisseur’s obsolescence is even more bitingly satirized in an unnamed image that pictures an ancien régime connoisseur bewigged with chapeau bras tripping in the artist’s studio and piercing the artist’s portrait painting with his cane (Figure 2.10).³⁸ In these images, the connoisseur is not a savior of the artist but rather an outdated nuisance; a vestigial limb.

In those plays where the charlatan painter type begins to emerge, the deus ex machina—Salon admission and the accolades of the Salon’s audience—is quite different, and never benefits the charlatan. The centrality of the Salon to these stories is clearly stated in their titles: Le Déménagement du sallon, Les portraits au Salon, and Croutinet, ou Le salon de Montargis. In these plays, the charlatan painter type is publicly humiliated by the humbler yet competent protagonist; admission to and success at the Salon exhibition also wins the protagonist the object of his affection by either impressing or flattering her father or guardian. The Salon itself never actually features in the plays. These one-act plays peopled with very few actors were likely unable to recreate a busy, elaborate setting like the Salon exhibition. Admission to or success at the Salon occurs offstage and is reported to our actors and our audience.

Importantly, even in the Revolution, institutional accolades were used as a filtering mechanism. In the post–artiste libre world, in which the Revolutionary abolition of both guilds and academies increased access to the practice of the fine arts, how were the charlatans sorted out from the geniuses? The mechanism for this important stage in the cursus honorum was rendered very abstractly: the jury, whose judgment is mentioned, is never embodied, nor is the Salon audience, whose accolades are sometimes the condition for the protagonist’s success. The relative abstraction of the Salon as plot device contrasts with the obstacles and other solutions in these plays, where debtors, connoisseurs, and art sellers make regular appearances. Revolutionary through Consulate playwrights treated institutional accolades and successes as un-representable, and as such they only occur offstage. This was not an obstacle for graphic satirists, who, as we will see in Chapter 3, later developed iconographic vocabulary to represent Imperial structural changes that made the Salon exhibition central to the cursus honorum of the artist in post-Revolutionary Paris.

The Patente Debates

What, however, happened to the status of artiste libre—the very foundation upon which the Académie royale’s newfound privileged position had previously rested? Édouard Pommier has addressed how this category was called into question and remained deeply unstable from 1791 to 1797, though his account is rarely integrated into discussions of art-world institutional history during the Revolutionary period.³⁹ However, upon closer examination and when considered in relationship to the use of the struggling artist trope in graphic satire, it becomes evident that the patente laws and the debate surrounding them was a turning point in the status of the artist.

In 1791, the National Assembly abolished the French monarchy’s privilege system, which relied upon the personal allowance of a monarch. With this went France’s corporations and guilds, and all citizens were forbidden from creating societies or associations on the basis of a shared profession. In its place, a système de la patente (licensing system) was introduced in which any citizen hoping to make or sell anything would pay an annual fixed amount to the state in order to obtain their license. That amount would be determined based on the rental value of their base of operations.⁴⁰

This initially unpopular system became the subject of much debate from 1792 onward. For our purposes, it is of note that artists were not given an exemption to the patente law and thus needed to be licensed in order to make artwork. The conservative faction of the Académie royale, mentioned above, immediately sent an envoy in the form of its secretary, Auguste Renou, who in 1792 argued that the patente system could not possibly apply to products of genius, including the fine arts, letters, and sciences.⁴¹ The law would not, however, be revisited with artists in mind until 1795, during the Directory. By then, an exemption for letters and sciences had already been instated, but the fine arts continued to be ignored.

Debates around the status of the artist had previously orbited around the division between the liberal and mechanical arts. Revolutionary discourse fiercely rejected these categories: if the visual arts wished to retain a status of distinction, they had to be defined in relationship to industry and commerce instead. Between 1795 and 1797, when revisions to the patente law pertaining to visual artists were up for debate, the French art world had to quickly reconceptualize discourse around the status of the arts and artist to befit a capitalist system that applied an economic logic to the culture of work. This process is evident across the reports and addresses to the National Assembly, which try and repeatedly fail to convince the National Assembly that the visual arts deserve an exemption.⁴² This argument was only successful when Quatremère de Quincy responded, effectively reconceptualizing the distinction of the visual arts in relation to industry and commerce.⁴³

Across these responses, however, the notion of the starving artist was strategically wielded. Whereas, as we have seen thus far, art-world satire mobilizes the starving artist to highlight the hypocrisies, absurdities, and implicit threats of a free market for art to the material well-being of artists and the quality of artistic production, the notion of the starving artist shifted slightly but importantly in the 1795–97 debates. This shift was effected most articulately by Quatremère de Quincy but is also evident in the responses of the other deputies who preceded him—indeed de Quincy’s report honed and finessed the arguments that preceded his. It is at this point that the notion of the starving artist became not only a protest to the emergence of a free market for art, but also a sort of flotation device. The inglorious artist became a means by which the artist could retain their pre-capitalist status of distinction and avoid becoming conflated with industry, commodities, craft, and trades.⁴⁴

When reconsidered within this context it is unsurprising, then, that the patente laws are the most widely discussed and criticized development across my corpus of art-world satires. While the Académie royale debated its existence and factionalized, the category of artiste libre ceased to legally exist for several years. To reinstate this category, it needed to be reconceptualized and that conceptual shift wedded the status of the artist in capitalist society to his poverty and his non-participation in trade and commerce, thus legally establishing the necessity that visual artists adopt an anti-economic pretense in order to benefit from the freedoms accorded the artiste libre. Before we explore the impact of this shift on the evolving tropes of the inglorious artist, we will more closely examine this exceptional moment where art-world satire pivoted its attention to the patente laws and the debates around them, evincing artists’ assiduous attention to the discursive shifts that threatened to further destabilize the solidity of their social status.

The patente laws were established in 1791, when guilds and corporations were abolished and the Le Chapelier law barred the formation of workers’ associations. The French Revolutionary state considered taxation a core component of civic engagement and citizenship, and the patente played a central role in establishing an atomized relationship between each individual, their autonomous work, and the state.⁴⁵ An individual’s labor, rather than their property, was directly instead of indirectly taxed in a way that was consistent and measurable, unlike the intermittent and widely hated ancien régime vingtième income tax. But from 1793 to 1795, the patente was interrupted due to the increasingly insurmountable logistical difficulties of collecting it.

When it was reinstated on July 22, 1795, it was immediately subject to massive reforms over the next three years.⁴⁶ Five satirical images appeared, one of which was counterfeited several times, around 1795 when the Directory excluded all other liberal arts from requiring a license while noticeably omitting fine arts practice. The patente taxed workers annually on the basis of their place of work and the value of their boutique, store, or workshop’s property. But day and wage laborers and street sellers were exempted, just as these same liminal workers were also exempted from requiring corporate membership in the ancien régime.⁴⁷

The visual arts community contested the patente repeatedly until they were finally exempted from it. Auguste Renou, acting as secretary to the not-yet-disbanded Académie royale spoke against it in 1792.⁴⁸ Artists published a now lost petition against it in 1796, and then again in 1797. And around these dates, as the patente law’s application to visual artists was debated in the Conseil des Cinq Cents and Conseil des Anciens, delegates and citizens weighed in in published reports and opinions.⁴⁹ On July 1, 1797, Quatremère de Quincy issued his influential report—by far the most elegantly written and innovatively argued of the responses to the patente.⁵⁰ The Conseil des Cinq Cents and Conseil des Anciens approved a revision to the patente very similar to the 1776 decree on the artiste libre.⁵¹ Those artists that only sold their own art were exempted from the patente, but artists who engaged in the visual arts in a way evoking commerce were still required to pay the patente.

Just as Louis XVI’s 1776 decree effected a critical turning point in the status of the artist, issuing a formal legal distinction between the visual arts as a liberal versus mechanical practice and initiating the proliferation of the image of the starving artist, so too did the 1791–97 patente debates alter the course of the artist’s status and the mobilization of the starving artist image. The debates translated the liberal versus mechanical paradigm into one befitting a nation increasingly dedicated to measuring its glory in relation to its economic prosperity. Citizens arguing in favor of exempting visual artists from the patente discovered that rehearsing the liberal versus mechanical distinction would only attract accusations that they were still ideologically influenced by the arbitrary and despotic privilège system of the ancien régime.

A subtle conceptual shift played out across the patente debates. At the inception of the debates, Renou, then the secretary to the Académie royale, defined the debate in terms of visual art’s place amongst the liberal and mechanical arts. Quincy, who was Renou’s spiritual successor, entered the Institut de France in 1804 and became its secretaire perpetuel (permanent secretary) in 1816. He carefully redefined the debate in terms of visual art’s place within, or rather outside of, the world of industry and commerce, generally avoiding the liberal-versus-mechanical paradigm. Quincy and the respondents that preceded him acknowledged that an important shift had taken place between 1776 and 1797: commerce had become a central state function and the role of the artist needed to be redefined in relationship to it and nothing else.

All respondents to the patente debate between 1792 and 1797 grappled with the question of whether the visual arts warranted a status of distinction: some visual artists seemed to practice their art in a way that categorized them as entrepreneurial and commercial or as participating in industry, and others practiced it in a way befitting the broader category of fine art. An exemption from the patente law would constitute special treatment or protection, and would violate the principals of equality upon which the new Republican nation had been founded.

When Auguste Renou weighed in in 1792, shortly after the instatement of the patente requirement, his argument leaned heavily on the 1776 artiste libre decree, going so far as to cite it extensively throughout his Addresse to demonstrate that the National Assembly was revoking a right already won for the visual arts practiced as a fine art. He poignantly asked, “les Arts libéraux cesseront-ils d’être libres sous le règne de la liberté?” (will the liberal Arts cease to be free under the reign of liberty?), and quite brazenly questioned whether this imposition of laws from which the visual arts had already been freed was arbitrary, recycling Revolutionary language traditionally directed toward the ancien régime.⁵² He relied heavily on the distinctions proposed by the 1776 decree: a visual artist is practicing in a liberal manner if they do not have a boutique or shop and thus do not publicly traffic their artwork nor the artwork of others. This indicates that the visual art emanates from the mind and the genius, and not the hand, which would render it mechanical and thus commercial.⁵³

Renou’s argument held no sway but the artist petitions prompted the Revolutionary government to call upon Louis-Sébastien Mercier, the writer and cultural critic so essential to the ancien régime construction of the trope of the starving artist, who was invited to submit a report in 1796 to advise on whether visual artists practicing as fine artists (i.e., non-commercially) should be exempted from paying for a patente.⁵⁴ Mercier’s subsequent report is quite circuitous in its arguments and very damning to the visual arts though he ultimately concedes that the visual arts should be exempted from the patente. He is exceedingly disdainful of the visual arts, questioning their belonging within the category of fine arts and the liberal arts, as well as their moral worthiness and their intellectual content. He calls the visual arts the “soeur idiote” (idiot sister) to the other liberal arts, such as poetry and writing, all of which had by then been exempted from the patente.⁵⁵ He accuses painting in particular of encouraging vices and promoting adoration of luxury.⁵⁶ In this, he is the sole respondent to evoke the luxe debates from the end of the ancien régime, foundational to Revolutionary ideologies, which endeavored to root out the immoral components of the commercial world.⁵⁷ In this vein, he complains heartily about the semantic drift he has witnessed across his lifetime, where painters, sculptors, and engravers were now referred to as “artists.”⁵⁸

He ultimately, however, concludes that visual artists who practice as fine artists should be exempted because artists are starving: they are paid little for their paintings between arts dealers and brocanteurs who steal their profits, art amateurs who underpay them, and themselves, lost in their artwork, neglecting their own material needs.⁵⁹ He fears, moreover, that if these artists are required to pay the patente, they will all, by necessity, become commercial. Importantly, he portends that “on ne vit plus que des dessus de porte, & l’art de peindre devint un métier sous les entrepreneurs” (we see nothing but overdoor paintings, & the art of painting is becoming a trade under these entrepreneurs).⁶⁰ This image that Mercier paints of the starving artist forced to adapt, or rather maladapt, to a commercial system—who paints the very shop signs that he has been discouraged from hanging over his own place of work for fear of being categorized as “commercial”—becomes the basis for many art-world satire topoi, as we will explore in Chapters 3 and 4.

More immediately, Mercier’s excoriation of the nobility of the visual arts in his Rapport elicited a barrage of satirical responses from the artistic community, making Mercier the most critiqued person and his 1796 Rapport the most common target across my corpus of 532 art-world satires. The image Envain contre les Arts, ce vieux Roquet s’escrime, C’est le Serpent qui mords la Lime (In vain against the Arts, that old Pug fences, It’s the Seprent who bites the File, Figure 2.11) pictures Mercier, as indicated by the M on his collar, as a bulldog with quill in hand. His jowls are agape and his tongue wagging as he approaches a monument with the names of celebrated artists listed in chronological order—ancient Greek, Italian Renaissance, and finally classical French visual artists—indicating a teleological progrès des arts that culminates in France. The image’s text and the snake at the base of the monument recall Jean de la Fontaine’s late seventeenth-century edition of Fables, in particular the serpent and the file, which targets commentators who endeavor to bite into or criticize objects that can withstand them and would break their teeth. The bulldog Mercier and his 1796 derision of the arts at the Conseil des Cinq Cents is manifested here in the same fable, as Mercier the bulldog approaches the monument of the progrès des arts to bite into it.

The anonymous illustrator of Mr L’Ane comme il n’y en a point (Mr Donkey like no other, Figure 2.12) provides a less erudite critique of Mercier. Mercier appears as a donkey and a gagne-denier, laden with tools for cleaning as he pushes a wagon of vinegar.⁶¹ He kicks, stomps, and defecates on the finest works of Western art and culture, including Raphael’s Transfiguration and the works of Racine, which Mercier had previously criticized in his 1773 Du théâtre (On theater), which praised Shakespeare’s violation of Aristotelian principles of tragedy while criticizing the greats of the Comédie Française’s repertoire for their servitude to these principals.⁶² Quixotic windmills populate the background, further underlining that Mercier’s stance is born of ignorance, madness, and hubris.

The patente laws and Mercier’s dismissal of the visual arts are decried in an image by an E. Le Sueur that can be dated to circa 1796–97 in an inventory recently discovered by Klaus Kiefer. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe assembled a collection of about two hundred French satirical images, kept many of them, and carefully inventoried them in March 1797 (Figure 2.13).⁶³ Le Sueur’s image pictures a young artist whose Greek dress and long hair indicate he is a member of the barbus.⁶⁴ In a tiny mansarde apartment, surrounded by the tools of his trade, he clings in fear to a statue of Apollo whose plinth features a rebus: “Celui qui méprise Les Arts et n’en Sent pas L’utilité est [cruche]” (Those who disdain The Arts and are not Aware of their Utility are Idiotic). Another quatrain, copied down in Goethe’s inventory but cropped from the French National Library’s copy, reads

Le Peintre Créateur, que le génie inspire,

Par de Savants Tableaux peut Charmer et instruire;

De l’immortalité, il s’ouvre le Chemin,

En dépit des efforts d’un Jaloux Ecrivain.⁶⁵

[The Creator Painter, whom genius inspires,

Via Learned Paintings can Charm and instruct;

To immortality, he paves the Way,

Despite the efforts of a Jealous Writer.]

Undoubtedly, the “Jaloux Ecrivain” (Jealous Writer) is Mercier. The verse below the image underscores Le Sueur’s desire to re-establish the moral instructiveness and edificatory potential of the visual arts for the broader public, attempting to translate the “utility” of the visual arts to befit Revolutionary ideologies.

A few months later, in late December and early January, at least seven deputies shared their opinions on the proposal that visual artists who practice non-commercially should be exempted from the patente, and four—over half of the opinions offered—argued strongly against the exemption on the basis that the proposed distinction would instate a hierarchy wherein the artist was placed above the worker. Deputy Créniere likened the establishment of such a distinction between the fine arts and the mercantile professions to the in equities of the ancien régime system of protections and privileges, arguing it would selectively honor certain professions over others. He even questioned the notion of genius, asking whether it is indeed innate or whether it is cultivated over time.⁶⁶ Deputy Lecouteulx-Canteleu’s opinion, offered less than a week later, also uses the word “distinction,” arguing that if anything should be privileged it should be the “arts nécessaires” (necessary arts) for their utility to commerce.⁶⁷ Deputy P.C.L. Baudin shuddered at the thought that artists might be seeking out a superior status, akin to nobility, who, in the ancien régime, were also exempt from many taxes. Baudin abhored the continued use of the term “liberal arts” which, he claimed, was only in use in those nations that treated their workers so horribly that they were, essentially, enslaved.⁶⁸ Deputy Meillan was more measured in his response, recommending a system of equity instead of equality: he advocated that the patente requirement should be “softened” for artists in recognition that “les sublimes conceptions du genie [ . . . ] doivent fair des Français le premier people de l’univers” (the sublime designs of genius [ . . . ] must make of the French the prime people of the universe.)⁶⁹

Meillan employed an ancien régime notion of the glory of the nation where the “products of genius” are essential for establishing the superiority of the French nation, instead of industry and commerce alone. His fellow deputies who advocated for artists’ exemption from the patente generally agreed. Deputy Le Grand argued that “grans hommes” (great men) indicate the glory of the nation, and not territorial expansion or population growth.⁷⁰ If writers and poets are exempted, he asked, then why not visual artists?⁷¹ In comparison, however, to the deputies against the artists’ exemptions, Le Grand and his colleagues Deputy Larmagnac and Deputy Richou’s responses are extremely thin, and do not go far beyond arguing that certain visual arts are practiced non-commercially.

It is unsurprising, then, that visual artists took up the etching needle to advocate for themselves. The aforementioned 1797 Decret pas-tenté sur les arts (Figure 2.1) was so successful that it was faithfully copied and reprinted as Les Arts Pa-tenté par le decret (The Arts Not-Attempted by the decree).⁷² It figures an image of the allegorical figure of Truth or Falsehood holding a spear topped by a Phrygian cap and holding the scales of Justice. As in the patente laws, the balance is unfairly weighted heavily in favor of the mechanical arts, the latter of which are indicated by a sabot, a pitchfork, a broom, and a shop sign that says “Boutique de Mercier”—likely another dig at Mercier, as well as the trade of the marchand mercier who could traffic in fine art.⁷³

In the absence of any substantial or convincing rebuke to those who wished to see the patente applied to the visual arts, another petition was submitted by artists in 1797 alongside a published pamphlet titled Encore un mot des artistes, sur les patentes (Another word from the artists, on licensing).⁷⁴ Extremely brief and strangely argued, the anonymous pamphlet acknowledges that though no class of society should be privileged above the rest, the lot of the visual artist is conditional, often interrupted, and vacillates between paid work and unpaid work and cannot properly be taxed.⁷⁵ The petition prompted the Conseil des Cinq Cents to commission a second report, this time from Quatremère de Quincy, who produced the most substantial and articulate retort thus far. He quite carefully frames his argument in terms of commerce and industry, avoiding any recourse to the ancien régime discursive traps of his antecedents, such as recalling the nobility of the arts, visual arts’ contribution to the glory of the nation, or their status as liberal, and not mechanical, art.⁷⁶

De Quincy’s argument is fixed squarely within the logic of taxation and commerce. To be taxable, labor must be “fixe, lucrative & commerciale” (fixed, lucrative, and commercial) whereas the market value of an artwork fluctuates highly.⁷⁷ De Quincy then proceeds to divide the “arts du dessin” (the arts of drawing) into three separate parts: a spiritual component wherein the personality of the practitioner is inseparable from the execution of his work and can only be valued subjectively; a mechanical component (presumably mean ing manual mastery) that the arts of “la pensée & du genie” (the intellect & genius) require but that is not exclusive to them, which can only be valued “au toisé” or by the unit; and a mercantile or commercial component involving entrepreneurialism and trade that can be recognized by “signes extérieurs propres à tous les négoces,” or, in other words, necessitates self-promotion through advertising.⁷⁸

De Quincy here confronts the core of the debate. Poetry, writing, and music had already been exempted because those skills and their outputs are more easily construed as entirely intellectual, entirely products of genius. The arts of drawing, however, are shared by many classes of work, some of which involve the arts of design, which are useful to fabrication and industry. De Quincy provides a roadmap for compartmentalizing the entangled “arts du dessin” without introducing hierarchies that threaten to recreate ennobled classes of labor that receive special privileges and protections, à la ancien régime. He instead creates a relatively neutral category for visual art practiced as a fine art by defining it against the commercial arts: it cannot be paid for by the unit, and thus does not have fixed prices, and as such, is a commercially unstable and non-lucrative pursuit.

What de Quincy describes in very rational and neutral language was visualized with far more pathos in the pen and ink drawing Les Portraits à la Mode (Figure 2.14), whose perforations indicate it was a design for a now lost etching or engraving. The image depicts a group of extremely impoverished artists, some of whom are shoeless, and who are locked out of their studio incapable of affording the rent. They are all in deep distress as they languish in their sadness. The older artist in the lower right-hand corner attempts, unsuccessfully, to comfort crying children. And above him is a poster announcing the patentes, which ties the destitution of the artist and his family to the licensing law’s failure to exempt artists.

De Quincy’s elegant argument relies heavily on the idea that the artist, as a vocational practitioner, is precarious; is struggling, starving, or inglorious. This idea was popularized, as I have traced, following the 1776 decree by artists themselves as they struggled to adapt to suddenly drastically less regulated structures for the creation of visual art as a fine art. Ironically, how ever, to secure the artist’s status of distinction from commerce, it was essential, instrumental even, that he rely upon the newly popularized idea that the starving artist struggles to adapt to the instability of art in a free market, where it is treated as a speculative object.

It is at this precise moment where capitalist statehood emerged in Revolutionary France that de Quincy proposed what Pierre Bourdieu would later describe as a market of symbolic goods.⁷⁹ The artist is able to secure the distinction of his status by mobilizing the notion of the starving artist as proof that the art world is a world apart from the commercial; it does not follow the same rules, and its currency is largely symbolic, rather than financial.⁸⁰

How does it advantage the visual arts, however, to construe itself as “anti-economic” in its logics? These advantages are largely ideological. What we see across these patente debates is a crisis moment where the visual arts recognize that they have lost ground in a centuries-long battle to secure their status as a liberal art amongst other liberal arts, and as a public good and a key contributor to the glory of the nation. Though the image of the starving artist emerges as a response to previous shifts that threatened to destabilize the cursus honorum of artists, it becomes an essential component of the argument for the visual arts distinction, and thus protection, as a special category of artistic production. De Quincy leveraged the symptoms of the poison to secure an expedient cure.

A rampant but largely unaddressed biproduct of the artist’s classification as anti-economic, however, deeply affected and continues to affect the structure of art worlds: if artists are anti-economic, then should they be trusted with the administration of their own art world? In the ancien régime and the age of guilds and corporations, when economic entities were self-governed by their practitioners, it was a given that the Académie royale and Corporation des maîtres peintres would be governed by their membership, though of course discord ensued around which membership was best qualified. The Revolutionary conversion of the Louvre Palace to the Louvre Museum opened up questions around posterity that became essential. But in the Revolutionary period, art-world satire remained a site where artists advocated against administrative decisions entirely outside of their control.

The Louvre Museum and the Creation of an Administrative Class

The French State’s long held dream of exhibiting royal collections publicly in the Louvre Palace came to a head as those collections were seized and repurposed following the fuite royale (royal escape).⁸¹ In 1792, a Museum Commission was appointed of, notably, Jean-Baptiste Regnault, François-André Vincent, and others. The 1793 execution of Louis XVI accelerated a languishing timeline for the establishment of a public museum and that summer, the Muséum Français and Salon of 1793 were slated to open on August 10 and scheduled to coincide with the Festival of National Unity.⁸² The Museum Commission’s tasks were initially limited to organizing and curating the museum. During the Terror, however, their administrative role and constitution were hotly contested in the Convention by prominent members like Jacques-Louis David who fought to have its membership replaced with a more radical set of artists and to increase the Commission to a slate of ten artists rather than the previous six. His arguments, which were very much in line with the then-dominant SPRA’s, lambasted the Museum for its preference for objets de luxe. When, in 1794, David’s wishes were put into action and the Museum Commission, renamed the Conservatoire, was placed under the purview of the Ministry of the Interior, it set out to discard decorative objects and the minor genres, and any works that glorified the monarchy or church.⁸³ By 1797, the museum had been renamed the Musée central des arts, and the Conservatoire restricted the number of artist members amongst its rank, replacing them with a set of full-time bureaucrats and the expert and connoisseur Jean-Baptiste-Pierre LeBrun. By 1802, artists were excised from the Conservatoire entirely.⁸⁴

In this way, museum administration became the site of contestation between the Ministry of the Interior and artists who, long since unable to form an association, had little say in the constitution of this administration and were eventually excluded from it altogether. Indeed, the 1795 and 1796 Salons were organized by the Conservatoire instead of the SPRA or the Académie des Beaux-Arts.⁸⁵ This laid the groundwork for the Empire, Restoration, and July Monarchy, in which museum administration played an increasingly important gatekeeping role within Paris’s contemporary arts milieu and, accordingly, were for the first time targeted by art-world satire.

Satirical imagery in the Revolutionary period was especially attentive to the actions of the Directory government in relation to arts administration. In particular, the patente laws discussed throughout this chapter attracted a truly exceptional quantity of satirical responses. The 1796 to 1798 spoliation of Rome by the French Revolutionary army and the triumphal procession of these thefts in Paris in 1798 were also the subject, not only of significant debates among men of letters and journalists in the lead up to their removal, presentation, and display in the Musée central des arts, but also of satirical treatment.

In 1796, as Commander-in-Chief of the French army in Italy during the Revolutionary Wars, Napoleon oversaw an invasion of Italy. A Commission des Sciences et des Arts (Science and Arts Commission) was set up to decide and plan which works of art and agricultural technologies should be confiscated from these regions. As this Commission published and circulated its plans, Paris’s nascent world of cultural journalism erupted in debate, falling roughly but not exclusively upon radical Republican and Constitutional Monarchical political lines arguing for and against these spoliations, respectively.⁸⁶ The Décade Philosophique, run by Claude Alexandre Amaury-Duval, came out strongly in support of these spoliations in its May 29, 1796, issue.

The most effective criticisms of the spoliations were Quatremère de Quincy’s Lettres à Miranda sur les déplacements des monuments de l’art de l’Italie (Letters to Miranda on the displacement of arts monuments from Italy), published in 1796, which argued that Rome in fact acted as a total museum of the origins of Western civilization and could not be transferred elsewhere, not even on the grounds that the French Revolution epitomized the culmination of that civilization.⁸⁷ De Quincy’s response inspired the creation of a petition submitted on August 16, 1796, by a group of artists, including David, Anne-Louis Girodet, and Vincent, who argued that a committee of artists and men of letters should be selected by the Académie des Beaux-Arts subsection of the Institut de France, which had been established a year earlier. They should convene to decide whether it was truly advantageous to the arts and to artists to remove these objects from Rome—unfortunately, yet another failed attempt on behalf of artists to maintain a leadership role in arts administration, an expectation fostered by the ancien régime and corporate system but no longer as relevant in a political reality where the state brokered and mediated relations between individuals.⁸⁸

Ultimately, these objects, which included antique statuary, were confiscated from the Vatican collections and transferred to the Musée central des arts in Paris. Among these objects were the Laocoön, Apollo Belvedere, and Raphael’s Transfiguration. Marking a triumphal entry for Bonaparte and the objects he had confiscated occurred on July 27, 1798, the fine arts spoliations were accompanied by a procession of artists who had recently obtained prizes or won governmental contests, and by the administrators of the museum, then known as the Conservatoire.

Indeed the circa 1798 image L’Organisateur targets Amaury-Duval of the Décade Philosophique (Figure 2.15).⁸⁹ This image is one of few in this satirical corpus that were found in numerous copies, all of which have had nearly identical lettering added in ink.⁹⁰ A well-dressed connoisseur sits at a small desk in the Musée central des arts, studying and writing on the spoliations of Rome there housed. We can make out most prominently a restored Apollo Belvedere, as well as Raphael’s Transfiguration to its right. Amaury-Duval, signaled by the La Décade written below him, is seated atop the tools of the arts. His writing, it is implied, not only counteracts the efforts of the arts and its practitioners, but it is also ignorant, as indicated by his donkey’s ears; misguided, as indicated by the blind and equally ignorant evil spirit that guides him with a telescope that neither can see through; and incorrect, as indicated by the cloud that obscures the artworks upon which he comments. This satire was likely a response to the published warning Amaury-Duval issued to artists in April 1798 where he surmised that Paris’s contemporary artists were terrified to show their work at the Salon of 1798 for fear of being outshone by the nearby Roman artworks that had recently arrived.⁹¹

Other art-world satire evidenced deep concerns with the confiscation of Roman art and its triumphal procession through the streets of Paris, echoing de Quincy’s carefully articulated position from 1796. The circa 1798 image Eh bien, Messieurs! deux millions! (Well, Monsieurs! two million!, Figure 2.16) provides us an aquatint of Napoleon Bonaparte in the Musée central des arts. He gestures to the Apollo Belvedere and the Laocoön, which he auctions off to the deputies that trail behind him. In this image, the late Directory government’s Louvre Museum and spoliations does not evidence their appreciation for the arts, but rather an appreciation of their speculative exchange value. Indeed, by removing them from their intended contexts, these immobile artworks had been rendered mobile and as such are now trafficable as consumables, akin to furniture or fashion objects.⁹² The vulgarization of the arts is criticized in the anonymous image amour des arts (love of the arts, Figure 2.17), which presents a young besmocked painter who, accompanied the Italian spoliations during their triumphal entry in 1798. His face is ugly, deformed, and vulgar, with unkempt sideburns, furrowed brow, and over-pronounced philtrum columns. He exhibits an unnerving enthusiasm for the arts by strapping down the Apollo Belvedere and waving one of his hands above his head—this is conquered booty.

The establishment of the Louvre Museum and its population with the spoils of war only further enflamed already urgent ontological questions prompted by Revolutionary changes to the structure of Paris’s art world. A core question underlies Revolutionary art-world satire: what is the value of art, and by proxy the artist, in this shifting political regime and its economies? Suspicious that the value of art is primarily transactional or speculative, art-world satire obliquely raised this issue in its criticism of the spoils of war, and much more directly addressed it in that art-world satire that centers art market actors as art-world antagonists.

The Art Market as Antagonist

Understandably, the art market languished during the Revolutionary Wars.⁹³ The total number of auctions, which were reaching record highs at the end of the ancien régime, suddenly halved during the Revolutionary period, and halved again from 1794 onward when the Terror was in full swing. This dip in the market, which can be credited largely to the expulsion of that market’s audience from France and to a prolonged depression of its economy, created a vacuum within which artists turned to gagne-pain works—cheap printed images, portraits, miniatures, and cheaper media like gouache in the minor genres.⁹⁴ By the time the auction market picked up in volume under the Consulate, the market had decisively turned toward genres mineures in cheaper media, and thus reflected a newfound bourgeois, rather than aristocratic, taste for artwork in which the materiality of artworks was privileged above the “museological celebrity” of the artist.⁹⁵

This shift in the market for art was soon echoed in the composition of the Salon exhibitions of 1795, 1796, 1798, and 1799, where the number of history and landscape paintings sharply declined and the number of portrait and genre paintings increased. In 1795 and 1796, the number of history paintings, portraits, and landscapes reached roughly equal proportions of approximately 25 percent each. In 1798 and 1799, history painting and landscape painting dropped down to 19 percent and 21 percent, respectively, and portraiture eclipsed them with 37 percent of paintings exhibited, while genre painting held steady at its record high for the fin-de-siècle at 16 percent.⁹⁶

Accordingly, two new types of art-world satire antagonist emerged and appeared with increasing frequency from the Revolution onward: the creditor and art seller. Intruders on the artist-dominated landscape were no longer depicted as enemies, as in ancien régime art-world satire; instead, deputies of the world of finance and economics took their place. For instance, in L’Intrigue épistolaire, the obstacles that set the story in motion revolve around a prosecutor, Clénard, who prompts a bailiff (Michel) and notarial clerk (Guitard) to collect the debts and seize the goods of the comical character, the artist Fougère, and his wife. Similarly, Le peintre français à Londres features a greedy art merchant named Durocher as its principal antagonist. Durocher occupies the position of an art world “vulture,” preying on naïve and noble artists’ dire financial straits in order to force himself into the ecology of the art world as a middle man who makes much more profit than the artist himself. Further, echoing Martinet’s caricature above (Figure 2.8), Durocher’s ultimate goal is to force the protagonist into making political caricatures for Durocher to sell, indicating to us again the poverty of the art market and the means by which the artist’s hand is prostituted.⁹⁷ His vulturelike position is epitomized in a song that he villainously chants:

Je suis les peintres à la piste

Cherchant leurs chef-d’oeuvres nouveaux,

Je fais le destin d’un artiste

Lorsque j’achete ses tableaux;

Je revends ce qu’il a su peindre,

Et tour-à-tour nous obligeant,

Aucun des deux ne peut se plaindre,

Il a la gloire et moi l’argent.⁹⁸

[I track artists

Searching for their new masterpieces,

I create the destiny of an artist

When I buy their paintings;

I sell what he knew to paint,

Back and forth we help each other,

Neither of us can complain,

He has his glory and me my money.]

In satirical imagery, Le Peintre de Portraits tourmenté par ses Créanciers (Figure 2.2) and Le Grand Diable Mammon d’Argent (Figure 2.5), discussed above, echo this theme of the creditor and prosecutor as the natural enemies of the heavily indebted and naïve artist, who delves deep into his own pocket and the pockets of others in order to pursue a cursus honorum that will no longer provide him any financial stability. In Le Grand Diable Mammon d’Argent, our satirist recycles a sixteenth-century trope that resurfaced to mock the popping of the South Sea Bubble in 1720.⁹⁹ Bernard Picart’s elaborate 1720 engraving associates the devil of money and finances, nestled in the shadows of a cloud, to the representation of madness dressed in commedia dell’arte costume below.¹⁰⁰ But it is the devil who blows bubbles and tosses jester’s hats at the crowd that greedily reaches for shares in the bubble that has by now burst. The icon of fortune flies ahead of the procession, heralding poverty—not riches—though the devil and madness combined have fooled the crowd. In Le Grand Diable Mammon d’Argent, the iconography of madness is reserved exclusively for the painter, who is the only figure to fail entirely in his attempts to profit and, instead, tries to kill the devil so that no one can benefit at all.

On stage and in image, artists are figured as victims of a financial system that they are incapable of navigating, and that system is presented as speculative and corrupt. The vultures of that system are beset upon the artist and antagonize him in his poverty. Depictions such as these set the stage for art-world satire to grow its arsenal of strategies for satirizing the art market and the artist’s poverty in changing systems whose priorities increasingly migrate away from arts and culture.

A New Reality, a New Satirical Vocabulary

1795 was not only a landmark year in the hotly contested ecology of painting subjects on exhibition and at market, but also heralded the end of the Terror and the beginning of the much more moderate Directory government, which witnessed Napoleon Bonaparte’s rapid rise from popular star of the overseas Revolutionary Wars to leading political figure. The Directory backpedaled from its more radical antecedents, which, in France’s cultural sphere, had effectively obliterated the ancien régime’s Academies. In 1795, the Directory established the enduring Institut de France, which nominally re-established France’s previous Academic system but housed it within one umbrella entity. The Third Class of this entity included the fine arts. A limited number of artists, alongside other types of artists such as musicians, were appointed to this category. Appointees held this position for life, rewarded as they were on the basis of lifetime achievement.¹⁰¹ Though this Third Class was not given the title of an Académie until 1816, for purposes of clarity and consistency, I will here refer to them as the Académie des Beaux-Arts.

A national school for the fine arts was simultaneously established and named the École des Beaux-Arts. The Académie des Beaux-Arts was responsible for appointing the École’s officers and instructors and reserved their appointments for history painters, echoing the Académie royale’s policy of only permitting history painters to hold positions as officiers. However, the Académie’s jurisdiction was quite limited. They could present candidates to teach at the École des Beaux-Arts to the Ministry of the Interior but had no say in the final choice, and they presided over the Prix de Rome selections, but their hold over jurying the Salon and the concours and encouragements at the Salon was tenuous or non-existent and often shared or held instead by the Museum administration.¹⁰²

Rather, as we have established, the artistic cursus honorum during the Revolutionary period was more unclear than ever before. No institutional body existed within which artists could ensure a privileged position if they sought membership, and the clientele for Paris’s art market, as well as the artworks that clientele desired, was in flux. The establishment of the Académie des Beaux-Arts and École des Beaux-Arts went some way toward re-establishing a trajectory for an artist’s career, but the Académie des Beaux-Arts was not a corporation or association of artists: it was a late-career wreath of laurels given exclusively to a select few history painters.

Without a corporation around which the art world might orbit, Paris’s private art studios became increasingly important and privileged sites for artistic formation, establishing professional community and forging the path of the cursus honorum. The young students who apprenticed in the studios of leading painters multiplied, and this became an increasingly important source of revenue for those painters, who were paid by each student.¹⁰³ Appointments at the Académie des Beaux-Arts perhaps served as a beacon indicating to aspiring students in which private studios they should enroll to help them secure a coveted Prix de Rome.¹⁰⁴

The French art world experienced a high degree of turbulence during the Revolutionary period. The Académie royale’s supremacy was immediately called into question, the juridical status of the artiste libre was overturned, and the connoisseurial, ecclesiastical, and aristocratic patrons of the grand genre were expelled beyond France’s borders or rendered financially inept. By 1793, when the Académie royale was officially disbanded by the Convention, it was all but dead. Its previous monopoly over determining the criteria for the progrès des arts, the cursus honorum, access to the Salon exhibition, the jurying of prizes, and liberal arts formation had already been effectively contested by the Commune des Arts, SPRA, and Ministry of the Interior. And, as we have seen, Louis XVI and d’Angivillier’s hard-fought Academic supremacy in Paris’s art world was carved up and doled out to a variety of competing institutions from 1791 to 1799.

This enormous transition disrupted what had only briefly been a somewhat homogeneous art system. The logic of the patente or licensing system, from which artists were only exempted in 1797, espoused the logic of competitive individualism, which befitted the Revolution’s equation of personal liberty and equality with fiscal and economic liberalization. As such, though the Académie des Beaux-Arts styled itself as a continuation of the Académie royale, the differences were much more significant than their similarities. Under the veneer of continuity, the Académie des Beaux-Arts’ central role was to enshrine the production of artists who were perceived to have contributed to the progrès des arts. While it pantheonized them culturally, the Académie des Beaux-Arts had very little else it could do to ensure a young artist’s successful progression along the cursus honorum apart from its role in judging the Prix de Rome. Even then, the Revolutionary period had impregnated the French public with the notion that state patronage was inadequate. As such, the art market, as we have discussed, increasingly privileged minor genres, as did the Salon exhibition.

French graphic satire and popular theater explored the ramifications of this shifting system by visualizing the effect of these changes on the livelihood of the artist. They embody a complex position regarding the central questions of the progrès des arts and the cursus honorum as their imagery presents to us an artist increasingly incapable of protecting himself from the necessity of prostituting his art to commercial ends, but ironically and stubbornly resolved to avoid this prostitution nonetheless. They continued to identify the connoisseur and admission to the Salon as key gatekeepers to artistic success, although the Salon exhibit was only juried in 1798 and 1803. We thus find simultaneous conflicting imaginaries in this imagery: a desire to resuscitate the former clarity of the ancien régime cursus honorum alongside fears of its newfound slipperiness and invisibility; and disgust at anything approaching an aristocratic system.

As we trace the evolution and proliferation of art-world satire’s cast of characters and fictional frameworks, we find that we can read the notion of the inglorious artist in multiple ways simultaneously. Sometimes, he can be read as a critique of a free market system that disadvantages the artist who might find himself empowered by collapsing the distinction between the visual artist and all other workers in order to recognize his camaraderie with the growing number of liminal workers increasingly visible in a rapidly urbanizing Paris. And, we also encounter the inglorious artist as a vehicle to express anxieties that the artist’s status of distinction is under siege, insinuating that this status should be shored up and better distinguished or separated from that of pretender artists who fail to understand that the visual arts are a non-commercial practice and who, as such, threaten to dismantle the very premise upon which the visual arts have secured their distinction.

De Quincy secured the distinct status of the artist one last time, translating that distinction carefully to befit one of the first nation-states to define its wealth and progress in primarily economic terms. The cost, however, was to bind distinction and liminality to one another, rendering it near impossible to disentangle them. If the artist recognizes himself as a worker and attempts to remedy his liminality by participating fully in the world of commerce, he loses his distinction and can no longer count himself an artist. If he, however, accepts his liminality and seeks after prestige and other symbolic capital, eschewing at least an overt pursuit of commercial success and essentially accepting his poverty, he can retain his distinction.